Video has been obtained by a US news agency showing President George W Bush being briefed by officials on the eve of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The confidential video obtained by the Associated Press shows very strong warnings being given to Mr Bush about the potential strength of the storm.
It appears to contradict subsequent suggestions by the Bush administration that the threat had been unclear.
Critics say more could have been done sooner to evacuate the city.
Speaking by video link from a room in his Texan holiday ranch on 28 August last year, Mr Bush is shown telling officials: “We are fully prepared.”
He does not ask any questions as the situation is outlined to him.
Along with the video, AP obtained transcripts of seven days of briefings relating to Katrina.
The footage does the president no favours, the BBC’s Justin Webb reports from Washington.
It shows plainly worried officials telling Mr Bush very clearly before the storm hit that it could breach New Orleans’ flood barriers.
In the past, the president has said nobody anticipated a breach but the video shows Michael Brown, the top emergency response official who has since resigned, saying the storm would be “a bad one, a big one”.
“We’re going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event,” Mr Brown says.
He also gives a strong, clear warning that evacuees in the Superdome in New Orleans could not be given proper assistance.
Another official, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center, tells the final briefing that storm models predict minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane.
But he adds that the possibility of anticlockwise winds and storm surges could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun afterwards is “obviously a very, very grave concern”.
His concern was borne out by events when levees collapsed, letting in the floodwater disastrously.
The president, however, said four days after the storm: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”
Mr Bush later accepted he shared some of the responsibility for the flawed response to Katrina and the White House talked of the “fog of war” rendering decision-making difficult.
You can see the video of the bored Bush staring blankly as he was warned that the storm was potentially devastating. here.
Recall that the right blamed the government for failure, but they insisted it was the Democrats in state and local government, not Republicans.
And I think we know who they really blamed, don’t you?
I didn’t bother to watch Dick Cheney’s Traveling Emporium and Snake Oil Sales Extravaganza on Fox News Sunday, mainly because I knew that pro-torture Chris Wallace and the whole pro-torture team over there would treat it like a fanzine fluff piece. Wallace’s hourlong fellatio session probably satisfied Cheney immensely, and predictably, the other networks saw fit to publicize Little Dick and his concubine, because what a former Vice President says is automatically news! News! News! Don’t you remember all those prime-time slots for Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle and Al Gore recently?
In this case, there was some news made, although not of the variety that’s being reported. First of all, Cheney, who appears to think that the Bush White House functioned under the auspices of the law, believes that the Attorney General of the United States is a political appointee. I’m sure that, in the case of Alberto Gonzales, that was true. It’s not how the American system works, of course.
The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the administration. He’s now saying, well, this isn’t anything that he’s got anything to do with. He’s up on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and his attorney general is going back and doing something that the president said some months ago he wouldn’t do […] Well, I think if you look at the Constitution, the president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land. The attorney general’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the cabinet.
Fourthbranch would have been the world’s best Revolution-era Tory. He truly believes in the divine right of kings. Witness later in the interview, where he in his capacity as chief law enforcement officer of the United States decides to toss out the law books.
WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?
CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. … It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.
WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.
CHENEY: I am.
Worked so well, in fact, that CIA and military interrogators killed dozens of detainees in their custody. But what’s a little torture and murder when you’re talking about saving lives? Oh, and Cheney’s answer is a lie, but that’s redundant.
I seem to recall the Bush/Cheney era a little differently. Cheney thinks it was a sterling success when it came to national security and counter-terrorism. Perhaps there’s something to this. After all, except for the catastrophic events of 9/11, and the anthrax attacks against Americans, and terrorist attacks against U.S. allies, and the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush’s inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, and waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush’s international unpopularity, the Bush/Cheney record on counter-terrorism was awesome.
After the previous administration established a record like that, President Obama didn’t ask Cheney for tips? The nerve.
You see what Cheney is doing here. He wants to politicize the Bush terror policies – the investigations being sought by the Attorney General are “clearly a political move,” he says – so that any attempt to question them becomes a partisan food fight instead of simply the application of law. This is his metier and he does it very well, judging from all the attention he receives every time he emerges from the bunker. Conservatives, ever on the lookout for victimization, cry that the Justice Department is being all political by investigating torture and murder, and the media cover the ping-pong match.
As one of the first bloggers (if not the first) both to object to Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey’s insane op-ed opposing healthcare reform and to suggest a boycott of Whole Foods, let me be among the first to agree with Michael Pollan that the chain should not be boycotted. I, for one, plan on immediately shopping again at Whole Foods, assuming, of course, that they’ve cut all corporate ties with John Mackey.
Until then, Whole Foods is more than welcome to make their money catering to all the hordes of Mackey’s fellow conservatives who just love to shop there. People, for example, like this brilliant mind. She makes such a tremendously convincing case that elitist liberal scum (like Michael Pollan) want her to pay more for her food thereby depriving her of the scratch to purchase common salt-of-the earth American goods like Ikea; or that wholesome, inexpensive treat sold at all NASCAR rallies: Haagen Daz ice cream; or that third set of overpriced designer sneakers.
And oh! How she’ll love the prices at Whole Foods!
[Update: I hope it is clear that the gaping hole in Pollan’s argument is not that Mackey is a rightwing lunatic. Of course, he has every right to be a rightwing lunatic. No, the problem Pollan deliberately elides is that Mackey very publicly advocated far right nonsense and heaped contempt on the values of his customers. In short, Mackey has publicly bitten the hands that feed him.
I don’t care whether Whole Foods takes a stand in favor of healthcare reform, although it certainly would make self-interested corporate sense if they did. As far as I’m concerned, they simply need to stay neutral from this debate. But as long as their CEO feels it necessary to publicly advocate against the wishes of its customers, I see no reason why I can’t pick up my food at farmer’s markets and other sources. Of course, some of the suppliers are as politically nuts as Mackey, but they don’t go around rubbing their customers’ noses in that fact.
If Mackey wants to use Whole Foods as a bully pulpit to sell rightwing garbage, that’s totally cool with me, it’s a free country. And Ill be happy to shop at Whole Foods again once they return to their main business, which is not selling junk ideas but selling decent food.]
Commenter antifa wrote in another thread on Sunday night:
I called Mama Marisol, got her on her cell phone. She had her crystal ball in the front seat, and she was ‘leavin-leavin, cher.’
Heading up Basin Street past St. Louis 1, she saw all the skeletons sitting on top of their tombs, rolling their bones and readin’ em, shakin’ their heads at her.
This won’t end well.
Mama marisol was right, cher. This is terrible.
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan Thinkin’ ’bout my baby and my happy home
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break And all these people have no place to stay
Now look here mama what am I to do I ain’t got nobody to tell my troubles to
I works on the levee mama both night and day I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away
Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose
I works on the levee, mama both night and day I works so hard, to keep the water away
I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me I’m goin’ back to my used to be
I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home
That night was the beginning of one of the most horrific events this country has ever experienced. All I felt that day was a sense of dread, not knowing how bad it was. But it was so much worse than I could have imagined:
11AM CDT — BUSH SPEAKS ON IRAQ AT NAVAL BASE CORONADO [White House]
MIDDAY — CHERTOFF CLAIMS HE FINALLY BECOMES AWARE THAT LEVEE HAS FAILED: “It was on Tuesday that the levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city.” But later reports note that the Bush administration learned of the levee breach on Aug. 29. [Meet the Press, 9/4/05; AP]
PENTAGON CLAIMS THERE ARE ENOUGH NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS IN REGION: “Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said the states have adequate National Guard units to handle the hurricane needs.” [WWL-TV]
MASS LOOTING REPORTED, SECURITY SHORTAGE CITED: “The looting is out of control. The French Quarter has been attacked,” Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said. “We’re using exhausted, scarce police to control looting when they should be used for search and rescue while we still have people on rooftops.” [AP]
U.S.S. BATAAN SITS OFF SHORE, VIRTUALLY UNUSED: “The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore. The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents. But now the Bataan’s hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty.” [Chicago Tribune]
2PM CDT — PRESIDENT BUSH PLAYS GUITAR WITH COUNTRY SINGER MARK WILLIS [AP]
BUSH RETURNS TO CRAWFORD FOR FINAL NIGHT OF VACATION [AP]
ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg] I think it’s time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you’re working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It’s never too soon to be prepared.
Doc Bainbridge chastises me for my insensitivity and implores my more mature colleagues to take me to task. He even goes so far as to call me Taranto-esque, for what that’s worth.
Perhaps Professor Bainbridge — of whom I am a fan — thinks something really awful will befall the denizens of the Superdome and therefore making a joke at their expense is wrong. My guess is that it will simply be a really unpleasent time for the remainder of the day, but hardly so unpleasent as to sanctify them with refugee or some other victim status. I assumed the reference to gill-growing and whatnot made it clear where I was coming from. I’m sorry if we don’t always fulfill the good professor’s expectations around here. But it can’t be all brandy-snifters and Latin puns in the Corner.
Immediate reactions to tragedy are always telling. And it only got worse as the week wore on.
Meanwhile, if you want to know what a living nightmare really is, read this story from today’s NY Times Magazine about the plight of one of the hospitals during those horrible days, the awful decisions they faced and the people who made them.
It’s almost impossible to believe that it happened in a country that hadn’t been obliterated by an apocalyptic event so extreme that the entire national infrastructure was completely paralyzed. It wasn’t. It just didn’t respond:
I’m planning to revisit Katrina all week, as I usually do. Hopefully, there will be some good news as well. But I think it’s important to remember what happened there, especially as we see the red faced anger coming from people who don’t believe that Americans have an obligation to help their fellow man in times of trouble. It’s clarifying.
Yesterday, in my invitation to the upcoming conversation with Dave Neiwert about his book The Eliminationists, I wrote:
There times when a writer publishes a book at exactly the right moment and this is one of them. With violent mainstream rhetoric hitting peaks we haven’t seen in nearly 40 years, the village is struggling to comprehend where it’s all coming from and what it means. They haven’t been paying attention.
On the other hand, there are times when a writer’s timing and thesis are so wrong, it’s inuntentionally funny. For instance, John Podhoretz published his tribute to George W. Bush Bush Country: How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century—While Driving Liberals Insane just before everything went to hell in a handbasket.
Poor Kurt Anderson obviously believed the hype that America had permanently cast off its long history of racism, the right wing had been permanently neutered by the election of Barack Obama and a new era of post partisan cooperation was sweeping the the nation. I guess somebody had to write that book, but I wouldn’t have taken that bet in a million years. (Maybe for a million dollars …)
He dances quite admirably during that segment, but it’s not very pretty. After our summer of teabaggers packing heat and “Obama is Hitler” rhetoric it’s a little hard to argue that our political differences have been solved, particularly since their behavior seems to have seriously affected the debate, at least in the village.
The crazy and the hate is still with us. If you want to read a good book about modern American politics, just read Nixonland . The original title was Nixonland: Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, but the publishers foolishly insisted on changing it. Not only was the original more interesting it was more accurate. We’re still living it.
In 2000, angered by the rightward, DLC-led turn of the Democratic Party, I became interested in Bill Bradley’s candidacy for the Presidency and voted for him in the California primary. Needless to say, he didn’t win that year, and he retreated to the world of speeches and occasional op-eds as an eminence grise of politics. During that 2000 campaign he would talk very adamantly about how all Americans should have access to quality, affordable health care. It was a pillar of his campaign. Now a member of the punditocracy, he can imagine some grand compromise between the left and right on the issue.
Since the days of Harry Truman, Democrats have wanted universal health coverage, believing that if other industrialized countries can achieve it, surely the United States can. For Democrats, universal coverage speaks to America’s sense of decency and compassion. Democrats also believe that it will lead to a healthier and more productive country.
Since the days of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have wanted legal reform, believing that our economic competitiveness is being shackled by the billions we spend annually on tort costs; an estimated 10 cents of every health care dollar paid by individuals and companies goes for litigation and defensive medicine. For Republicans, tort reform and its health care analogue, malpractice reform, speak to the goal of stronger economic growth and lower costs.
The bipartisan trade-off in a viable health care bill is obvious: Combine universal coverage with malpractice tort reform in health care.
On what planet does Bill Bradley spend most of his time? Let’s grant him for a second the possibility that Republicans want to reach a compromise at all on health care reform, something they have not at all shown in every single day of this debate. Mike Enzi, one of the “bipartisan” negotiators, is still referring to death panels and has been quoted as saying he’s only participating in talks to stop a bill from getting passed. So you have to waive a lot to get to Bradley’s notion of a model Congress.
But tort reform, which is one of those conservative buzz words which has been drained of most of its meaning, has been a state issue, at the behest of Republicans, for many years, and 38 states have enacted it in one form or another. It would be curious for Republicans to compromise on universal health care in exchange for something most states already have. What’s more, given that we have this evidence from over 75% of the country, we can pretty quickly determine that medical malpractice suits are at best tangential and more accurately completely meaningless to the health care debate. Josh Richman, a very good journalist in the SF Bay Area, rounds up that evidence:
“(A)nnual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to “a drop in the bucket” in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, said Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard University economist. Chandra estimated the cost at $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion, in a 2005 study. Insurer WellPoint Inc. said last month that liability wasn’t driving premiums.”
The Congressional Budget Office in 2004 concluded that medical malpractice tort reform wouldn’t have a significant effect on health care costs:
“Malpractice costs amounted to an estimated $24 billion in 2002, but that figure represents less than 2 percent of overall health care spending. Thus, even a reduction of 25 percent to 30 percent in malpractice costs would lower health care costs by only about 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent, and the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small.”
And Americans for Insurance Reform, a coalition of nearly 100 consumer and public interest groups around the country, issued a report in July which found:
• Medical malpractice premiums, inflation-adjusted, are nearly the lowest they have been in over 30 years. • Medical malpractice claims, inflation-adjusted, are dropping significantly, down 45 percent since 2000. • Medical malpractice premiums are less than one-half of one percent of the country’s overall health care costs; medical malpractice claims are a mere one-fifth of one percent of health care costs. In over 30 years, premiums and claims have never been greater than 1% of our nation’s health care costs.
Democrats like Bill Bradley validate conservative claims on things like tort reform despite all evidence to the contrary, then decide that honest men can strike a wonderful compromise despite having no negotiating partner on the other side.
Just in case you were wondering why Democrats lose national debates.
I feel so much more informed having watched the Stephanopoulos round table with Liz Cheney, who was referred to as a “Republican Strategist.” (I guess “Bipolar Strategist” Glenn Beck wasn’t available.) Luckily, we had “Democratic Strategists” George Will, Gwen Ifill, Sam Donaldson and EJ Dionne on there to balance out the discussion. Not that it was necessary since she is such a reasonable, dispassionate member of the political scene, especially when it comes to the issue of torture. Let’s just say she had a few things to say. At a very high decibel level.
The only one who felt comfortable arguing with her on a subject with which she was so obviously personally invested, being as she’s the spawn of Torquemada and all, was Sam Donaldson who valiantly tried, but sadly, didn’t have the facts at hand. The others simply grinned like jack-o-lanterns (except “village strategist” George Will who helpfully supplied some misleading facts from an anonymously sourced, self-serving article in the Washington Post. See: Greenwald)
She also argued against health care, although it was hard to understand since she apparently believes that the Democrats’ proposals included torture, which she oddly seemed to be arguing was a bad thing.
Meanwhile, on John King, Orrin Hatch reiterated that the CIA is going to be too timid or too angry to stop a terrorist attack if any of them are held accountable for their actions. And once again, I have to say how much this worries me. If this is the character of the people we have working in the CIA then they all need to be fired immediately and we need to find some patriots who won’t sell out their own countrymen out of fear or pique. It’s a tough job and criminals, wimps and traitors don’t qualify.
All in all, I learned a lot this morning — mostly that I will never get those two hours of my life back.
Tristero at Hullaballoo knows that it can be proved that Kennedy relied totally on the facts, if only somebody else would actually go and find them.
Typically, in the blogosphere, this would set off entertaining backnforth nastiness, generate mutual accusations of illiteracy, and conclude with pretzelled suggestions as to what should be put, and exactly where, to various family members related to the combatants. Instead, I’ll travel the road rarely taken and simply concede, without any excuses, Harshaw’s point: he’s right. I should have done more studying and written a well-researched defense of Kennedy’s denunciation of Bork.
More importantly, at the very least someone should have written such a post. But nobody has, at least no one with enough visibility to get on Mr. Harshaw’s radar (or mine; please feel free to send links).
Kennedy’s speech against Bork was one of the Senator’s shining moments. It was also one of the last times that a major liberal voice swiftly and directly confronted – without retreating! – a blatant attempt to place extreme right activists in positions of power where they could wreak havoc on the country.* So… instead of celebrating Kennedy’s effort, or even treating it as a he said/she said dustup, Harshaw juxtaposed two video clips – one of Kennedy, the other of the Army/McCarthy hearings.
That’s right: a staff writer at the New York Times directly compared Teddy Kennedy’s yeoman efforts to prevent a well-documented rightwing lunatic from becoming a Supreme Court justice to McCarthy’s fact-free witchhunt against non-existent communists. Fox News didn’t do this. The New York Times did.
This comparison – Ted Kennedy to Joseph McCarthy – is, to be very, very kind, utterly outrageous, but it is not entirely Harshaw’s fault. Or, if you prefer, there is nothing we can do to entirely prevent such fatuous nonsense, but we can certainly make it more difficult to pull off with a straight face. So how about it progressives?**
Even more important than Kennedy/Bork, the extreme right is about to roll out many “new products” for the fall (those who remember September 2002 know what I’m talking about); some, like the “Tea Party Express,” have already started and are timed to climax in September. The bestseller lists are swamped with rightwing screeds, the airwaves filled with nothing but their hateful spokesmen or expressions of sorrow, deliberately emptied of all progressive content, on Kennedy’s death.
And so, whaddawegot for September?
Uh, huh. That’s what I was afraid of.
*Of course. there were other liberals who’ve done fantastic things, eg, Wellstone. But neither he nor any other liberal has since had the national name recognition of a Kennedy or his iconic, legendary, stature. At the very least, Kennedy’s derailing of Bork should not be ignored by progressives, as it has been, almost universally, during the eulogies of the past few days. He saved the country.
**Oh, you bet your bippy I’ll posting the details on Bork, but I shouldn’t be the only one.
If you feel like making yourself stupid, read this:
With polls showing that President Obama is losing ground, The Post asked political experts what he could do to regain the initiative. Below are contributions from Scott Keeter, Michael S. Berman, Newt Gingrich, Donna Brazile, Robert J. Blendon, Christine Todd Whitman, Dan Schnur, Ed Rogers, Harold Ford Jr. and Ed Gillespie.
World War II movies can generally be divided into four distinct categories. There’s the no-nonsense, historically accurate docu-drama (The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge, Tora! Tora! Tora!). There’s the character-driven, grunt’s-eye-view yarn that is either “based on a true story” or endeavors to retain historical feasibility (Saving Private Ryan, The Big Red One, Hell Is For Heroes). There’s the Alistair MacLean-style action-adventure fantasy; not so believable but maybe keeping at least one toe grounded in reality (Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen, The Eagle Has Landed). And finally, there’s the “alternate reality” version of Dubya Dubya Two (Castle Keep, The Mysterious Doctor, and, um, The Keep ). Quentin Tarantino’s new war epic, Inglourious Basterds, vacillates somewhere in between action-adventure fantasy and alternate reality.
Sharing scant more than a title with the, erm, more correctly spelled 1978 original (which was itself a bit of a knockoff of The Dirty Dozen) Inglourious Basterds is ultimately less concerned with WW2 than it is with giving the audience a Chuck Workman on acid montage of 20th century cinema, “101”. It’s not like we haven’t come to expect the cinematic mash-up/movie geek parlor game shtick in Tarantino’s films, but he may well have outdone himself in this outing, referencing everything from the Arnold Fanck/Leni Riefenstahl mountain movies (!) to Al Pacino’s final stand in Brian DePalma’s Scarface .
Tarantino wastes no time reminding us of his particular obsession with Sergio Leone right out of the starting gate (aka “Chapter 1” in Tarantinospeak), with a prelude cut straight out of Once Upon a Time in the Westand pasted into “Nazi-occupied France”. Remember Henry Fonda’s memorably execrable villain in that film? He appears to have a soul mate in SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a disarmingly erudite sociopath who has been assigned the task of methodically combing France to round up and eliminate Jews who might be hiding out in the countryside. Landa is very good at his “job”, which has earned him the nickname of “The Jew Hunter” (charming, no?). After setting you up with an antagonist that you know you are going to love to hate (especially after his introductory scene) Tarantino serves up some heroes that you are going to hate to love (I’m starting to think that boy just lives to make his audiences squirm…okaaay?).
A scenery-chewing Brad Pitt stars as Lieutenant Aldo Raine (whose name, I am assuming, is a clever-clever homage to the late actor Aldo Ray, who was a staple player for many years in war films like Battle Cry, The Naked and the Dead, Men in Warand The Green Berets). Lt. Raine has been charged with assembling a Geneva Convention-challenged terror squad comprised of a hand-picked group of Jewish-American G.I.s. Their special assignment: Kill Nazis. Oh, I know what you might be thinking-“Wasn’t that the general goal of the Allied forces in Europe in WW II?” Yes (if I may retort), but as far as I recall, the mission orders normally didn’t include a directive to also (literally) take scalps. And forget about taking prisoners; although they usually purposely leave a lone survivor (not before they etch out a Charlie Manson-esque souvenir in his forehead).
At any rate, the self-anointed “Basterds” have managed to “carve out” quite a name for themselves, and have become the bane of evil Nazis (or as Raine refers to them in his Huckleberry Hound drawl, “GNAT-sees”) everywhere (these are some bad-ass Jews). Even the Fuhrer (Martin Wuttke) fears them; he is particularly chagrined whenever the name of the dreaded “Bear Jew” (Eli Roth) is mentioned. This particular team member (known to fellow Basterds as Sgt. Donny Donowitz) has earned his nickname from his swarthy, hulking appearance and a preference for dispatching Nazis utilizing a baseball bat (move over, Sandy Koufax). These happy Jews, this band of bubelehs have even enlisted a Nazi-hating German defector (Til Schweiger) who fits right in (he’s a psycho!).
Now, don’t despair-this outing is not strictly a Braunschweiger fest. No Tarantino film (at least from Jackie Brown onward) would be complete without an ass-kicking heroine. Shosanna Dreyfus (played with smoldering intensity by Melanie Laurent) is a French Jew with a personal score to settle with one of the main characters (yes, it does bring The Bride in Kill Bill to mind). She’s a clandestine resistance fighter (a la Melville’s Army of Shadows) who has covered up her Jewish heritage by changing her name and “hiding in plain sight” as the proprietress of a popular movie house (which of course conveniently affords Tarantino the opportunity to REALLY pile on the movie homage-and create the ultimate dream girl for film geeks like me). Her story eventually converges with the Basterds (and her quarry), which culminates in an audacious, grand guignol-fueled finale.
Love him or hate him, there are two aspects of filmmaking that Tarantino has inarguably proven to have a golden ear and an eagle eye for: crackling dialogue and spot-on casting. As usual, every actor seems to have been born to play his or her respective part in this film, especially Waltz (is there a more appropriate name for an Austrian actor?). Repellent as his character is, there is a twinkling, pure joy of performance bursting just beneath the grease paint that is exhilarating to watch. Pitt, who actually doesn’t get as much screen time as the pre-release hype and movie trailers may have led you to believe, seems to be having the time of his life. Diane Kruger is excellent as a German movie star who is feeding intelligence to the Allies. A heavily made-up Mike Myers can be seen as a British general (the type of supporting character “back at HQ” that you could picture Anthony Quayle, Jack Hawkins or Trevor Howard playing back in the day). As you might expect, there are cameos a-plenty, including Rod Taylor (as Winston Churchill) and Bo Svenson (a veteran from the original film who you’ll miss if you blink). Don’t strain your eyes trying to spot the cameos by QT stalwarts Harvey Keitel and Samuel L. Jackson; they are heard, but not seen. Tarantino appears as a dead German soldier who is shown being scalped (which undoubtedly fulfills the fantasies of some of his detractors).
One aspect that makes this film an anomaly in the QT oeuvre is the fact that much of the dialogue is spoken in-language by the French and German actors. It’s quite a testament to the director’s formidable writing skills that after the first few scenes, you don’t really notice that some characters will frequently switch idioms (especially the amazing Waltz, who proves fluency in German, French, Italian and English). Even when subtitled, the words veritably sing and dance with Tarantino’s unmistakable, idiosyncratic pentameter.
In the context of purely visual storytelling, I think that Inglourious Basterds signals the director’s most assured, mature and resplendent work to date (beautifully lensed throughout by Robert Richardson, who was the DP on both Kill Bill films and previously a veteran of 11 Oliver Stone collaborations). This is particularly evident in the film’s opening scene, which immediately draws you in with an eye-filling, gorgeously expansive exterior shot of the French countryside. The prelude to the film’s finale is arguably THE visual highlight of any QT film to date. In a possible homage to Joan Crawford’s Vienna (whose name is derived from the French word for “life”) donning her rose red blouse for the final showdown with her black-clad nemesis in Nicholas Ray’s deliriously lurid revenge western Johnny Guitar, Shosanna (whose name derives from the Hebrew word for “rose”) dons her vividly Technicolor red dress as she prepares for the showdown with her black-clad nemesis, scored with David Bowie’s “Putting Out Fire” (originally used as the theme for Paul Schrader’s 1982 version of Cat People). It’s a ballsy move by Tarantino, but not unlike his similarly brash gamble of doing a wholesale lift of the theme song from Across 110th Street for Jackie Brown’s opening credits, I’ll be damned if it ain’t the perfect choice (maybe he figured it would have been pushing his luck to also “borrow” the “harmonica man” theme from Once Upon a Time in the West?).
Finally, I wanted to share a thought or two about the violence, which is de rigueur for any Tarantino film, and which invariably provides the catalyst for discord in any conversation between QT disciples and QT detractors. Yes, scalping is an abhorrent, gruesome thing to watch. There are stabbings, shootings, and deaths by strangulation and bludgeoning. This is not Pinocchio . Yet, if you were to add up all of this simulated mayhem in actual screen time, I’m guesstimating that it wouldn’t be much more than 10 minutes (out of a 153 minute total running time). With the possible exception of Kill Bill – Volume One(an over-the-top affair in the bloodletting department by anyone’s standards) I think that the knee-jerk tendency is to perceive a higher ratio of violence in Tarantino’s films than actually exists. In fact, do you want to know which scene has the most white-knuckled, edge-of-your seat, heart-pounding suspense in this film? A fucking game of charades. Charades. I won’t spoil it for you; just know that wherever Alfred Hitchcock is, he’s probably looking down on QT with a nod and a wink…from one inglourious basterd to another.
, 
, 
, 
(which was itself a bit of a knockoff of 
.
, Shosanna (whose name derives from the Hebrew word for “rose”) dons her vividly Technicolor red dress as she prepares for the showdown with her black-clad nemesis, scored with David Bowie’s “Putting Out Fire” (originally used as the theme for Paul Schrader’s 1982 version of 
for 
